User:Erik Zachte

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	Erik Zachte at Wikipedia Meeting in Utrecht / Photo: Muijz

[edit] About me

I am Dutch, 51 years old and live in Leiden.

Interests: science, history, movies, modern art, games.

I studied biochemistry and history each for several years, visited art school (Rietveld Academy) for two years.

Why all those unfinished studies? I study out of curiosity and, despite quite satisfying grades, not especially as preparation for a job. A family trait, my brother and sister each did not complete three studies, and like me suffered no terrible consequences.

I work as software engineer at KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines) for 24 years now.

[edit] Soezo

One of my cats.

No digital processing was involved.

Yet no animal was hurt during the photo-shoot.

[edit] Perl scripts

[edit] Wikipedia on the handheld

April 2003 I wrote a lengthy Perl script that converts the Wikipedia to TomeRaider format. I essentially rebuilt the whole online Mediawiki parser in perl, not by 1:1 conversion but from the ground up.
TomeRaider files can be browsed on Palm, Pocket PC and EPOC handhelds and on Windows.

From July 2004 till February 2005 I upgraded the scripts to the completely revised TomeRaider 3 release.
Keeping the scripts up to date with constantly evolving Mediawiki syntax is quite a challenge.

[edit] Statistics for all Wikipedias

July 2003 I started to work on a set of Perl scripts to produce extensive statistics for all Wikipedias. These statistics are now available at the Wikipedia server in 20 languages. They are refreshed monthly, after a new XML dump (= backup) of the databases has been produced, which serves as input.

[edit] EasyTimeline

This script makes it possible to define a graphical timeline using a reasonably intuitive script syntax. EasyTimeline has been incorporated into WikiMedia 1.3 in June 2004 (but can also be used offline). See meta for examples and syntax description, or for offline use this site.

For an overview of all charts (images and code) generated with EasyTimeline on all wikipedias see Timelines Index (index updated monthly as part of the stats job)